Hermann Otto Solms

Hermann Otto Solms (2018)

Hermann Otto Prinz zu Solms-Hohensolms-Lich (born November 24, 1940 in Lich ) is a German politician of the FDP and was, with interruptions, treasurer of the party from 1987 to 2020 . From 1991 to 1998 he was chairman of the FDP parliamentary group and from 1998 to 2013 one of the vice-presidents of the German parliament . He has been the age president of the 19th German Bundestag since 2017 and thus also opened its constituent session . Mostly he uses the name Hermann Otto Solms in public , under which he is generally better known.

Career

education and profession

Hermann Otto Solms attended the Stein an der Traun educational home from 1950 to 1960 . After high school in 1960 at the Humanities College Pasing made Solms initially until 1961 his military service in the Air Force air defense battalion 45 in Lindau and completed in 1962, a bank clerk at BHF-Bank in Frankfurt, which he 1964 with the commercial assistant examination completed. He then began studying economics and agriculture at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and the Justus Liebig University in Gießen , which he completed in 1969 with a degree in economics .

From 1969 to 1970 he was Research Assistant for Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University . From 1970 to 1973 he was a research assistant at the Institute for Agricultural Management at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. From 1973 to 1976 he was personal advisor to Liselotte Funcke, then Vice-President of the Bundestag . In 1975 he became the department 20 (Nahrungswirtschafts- and Home Economics), University of Giessen with a dissertation The company game as a training method in agriculture to Dr. agr. PhD.

From 1976 to 1984 Solms was as entrepreneurs independently. From 1976 to 1982 he was the managing partner of Datagraph GmbH Computersysteme in Lich near Gießen.

Party career

Hermann Otto Solms and Jürgen Zieger (2008)

Since 1971 Solms has been a member of the FDP , whose federal treasurer he was from 1987 to 1999, 2004 to 2011 and 2013 to 2020.

In 1997 Solms, in his role as treasurer of the FDP, had requested the quarterly installments of the state party financing , but forgot to set the total amount. The then Speaker of Parliament Rita Süssmuth ( CDU ) had the amount paid out, but the Cologne Administrative Court denied the legality of the payment - it was about DM 12.4 million . The Münster Higher Administrative Court later reduced the repayment amount to DM 300,000, and the Federal Administrative Court ruled in May 2000 that the application had been submitted correctly and on time and that repayment was therefore not necessary.

After the sudden death of his successor Günter Rexrodt in August 2004, Solms was provisionally reappointed treasurer and elected on May 5, 2005 at the federal party conference in Cologne with 90.6% of the vote.

On December 7, 2013, he was re-elected as federal treasurer at the federal party conference in Berlin with 88.6% of the vote.

On May 15, 2015, he was confirmed in office at the federal party conference in Berlin with 93.4% of the votes.

Member of Parliament

Solms in the Bundestag, 2019

From 1980 to 2013 Solms was a member of the German Bundestag and has been a member of the German Bundestag again since 2017. Here he was deputy chairman from 1985 to 1991 and finally chairman of the FDP parliamentary group from January 15, 1991 to October 26, 1998 .

After the 1998 Bundestag elections , he was elected to the office of Vice President of the German Bundestag on October 26, 1998 , which he held until October 2013. Hermann Otto Solms always entered the German Bundestag via the Hesse state list . As Vice President, he was allowed to perform a historical function marginally and unnoticed: On July 1, 1999, he closed the last regular session of the Bundestag in the plenary hall of the Bundestag building in Bonn. This ended 50 years of Bonn parliamentary history.

On November 12, 2009, Hermann Otto Solms was elected chairman of Working Group II in the FDP parliamentary group with the policy areas: budget, finance, economy and technology, tourism, nutrition, agriculture and consumer protection.

On December 8, 2012, Solms lost to Heinrich Kolb in a fight for the top spot on the Hessian state list . As a result, Solms refrained from applying for positions on the list below. After the federal elections in 2013 , Solms left the Bundestag; the FDP failed in this election anyway because of the 5 percent hurdle.

In the local elections in March 2016, Solms ran for 79th place on the FDP list for the district council of the district of Gießen . Due to the allowable accumulation , he was elected to fourth place in the district council and became its age president.

Solms then announced that he would run again in the 2017 federal election. According to his own statement, he wants his candidacy to be understood in particular as an encouragement for older people to get involved in society. As a direct candidate for the FDP in constituency 173 , he received 7.7 percent of the vote. He moved into the new Bundestag as one of six Hessian liberals via the state list of his party and is thus again a member of the German Bundestag after a four-year break.

Solms is the age president of the 19th Bundestag , as he was a member of the German Bundestag for 33 years until 2013. Originally, with 45 years of service, Wolfgang Schäuble would have granted this honor . As a candidate for the office of President of the Bundestag and because of the associated inaugural speech, Schäuble renounced the retirement presidency.

Others

Solms is involved in the German Property Foundation on a voluntary basis , where he is chairman of the board of trustees. He was a founding member of the Association for the Promotion of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial , which supports the work of the memorial at the Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison . Since 2003 he has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom .

Solms criticized Daimler AG's announcement that it would no longer make party donations in the future. Corporate donations are "so wanted by our constitution" and an appreciation of the voluntary work of party members.

family

Solms' grandfather was Reinhard Ludwig zu Solms-Hohensolms-Lich (1867–1951), 1920–1951 head of the House of Solms-Hohensolms-Lich, which was raised to the rank of imperial prince by Emperor Franz II in 1792 . His father was Hermann Otto Wilhelm Ludwig Prince of Solms-Hohensolms-Lich (1902–1940), Doctor of Philosophy and Lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve . He had an accident a few months before Solms was born while serving in the Second World War in Neuruppin . His mother, a granddaughter of the Prussian diplomat Count Georg von Werthern-Beichlingen , Gertrud (1913–1987), born baroness and mistress of Werthern-Beichlingen , married the writer Hans Joachim Sell for the second time in 1950 . Solms has four older siblings: Philipp Reinhard (1934–2015), farmer and 1951–2015 head of the Solms-Hohensolms-Lich family, Dorothea Countess Razumovsky (1935–2014), publicist and journalist, Wilhelm Solms (* 1937), Germanist and former professor of communication science and media didactics at the Philipps University of Marburg , and Eleonore von der Burg (* 1938).

In addition, he has two younger half-brothers from his mother's second marriage, Konstantin Sell and the economist Friedrich L. Sell .

His daughter Marie Christine is the founder of a start-up company and moved into the Lich city ​​council in 2016 for the FDP .

Personal

Hermann Otto Solms is Protestant . From 1969 to 1971 he was married to Margit (* 1944), daughter of the businessman Albert Mayer, and has been married to Christiane Meyer (* 1955), who has a PhD in agricultural engineering , since 1989 , daughter of the landowner Horst Meyer zu Eissen. He has three daughters with her.

Honors

• 1986: Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1993: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1998: Great Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 2014: Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary
• 2019: Order of the Favorable Clouds
• 2019: Great Cross of Merit with Star and Shoulder Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany

Works (selection)

• Discussion of new tax models. In: Joachim Merz (ed.): Liberal professions - income and taxes. (FB € St); Contributions from science, practice and politics , Nomos, Baden-Baden 2008, ISBN 978-3-8329-3210-7 , pp. 191–205.
• (Ed.): The new income tax. Low, simple and just; Berlin draft of the FDP , Liberal-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-920590-04-X .
• Thomas Dehler - A guarantor of freedom. In: House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany (Ed.): Thomas Dehler und seine Politik , Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87584-721-0 , pp. 11-16.
• The business game as a training method in agriculture , German, Frankfurt am Main [u. a.] 1975, ISBN 3-88123-000-9 . ( Dissertation )

literature

• Friedrich Thelen : Bundestag Vice President Hermann Otto Solms. In: Michael F. Feldkamp (Ed.): The President of the Bundestag . Office - function - person. 16th electoral period, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-7892-8201-0 , pp. 194-201.
• Paul Kirchhof (Ed.): Perspectives of a modern tax law: Festschrift for Hermann Otto Solms , Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-503-09081-5 .

Web links

Commons : Hermann Otto Solms  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Website by Hermann Otto Solms
• Biography at the German Bundestag
• Literature by and about Hermann Otto Solms in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hermann Otto Solms on parliamentwatch.de

Footnotes

1. ↑ Hartmut Palmer: The breakthrough of the prince . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1993, p. 27-29 ( Online - May 24, 1993 ).
2. ↑ Bad formal error. FDP treasurer Solms and parliamentary leader Süssmuth under pressure for repayments. In: Focus . November 24, 1997. Retrieved December 18, 2012 . 
3. ↑ FDP decides on higher membership fees. In: Spiegel Online. August 25, 1999, accessed December 18, 2012 . 
4. ↑ FDP is allowed to keep 12.4 million marks. In: Spiegel Online . May 17, 2000, accessed December 18, 2012 . 
5. ↑ Michael Bröcker: Hermann Otto Solms ... leaves politics. In: rp-online.de. December 11, 2012, accessed December 18, 2012 . 
6. ^ Hannelore Crolly: The abrupt end of a career as a politician. In Hesse, the long-time Vice President of the Bundestag and financial expert Hermann Otto Solms is defeated by the FDP in the fight for first place on the list. Now he is giving up further candidacies. In: welt.de. December 8, 2012, accessed December 18, 2012 . 
7. ↑ ^{a b} Olaf Kern: Tailwind after the local elections: Hermann Otto Solms: The Comeback. In: Frankfurter Neue Presse . April 27, 2016, accessed February 1, 2017 . 
8. ↑ Thorsten Jungholt: Hermann Otto Solms Why the FDP treasurer starts again at 75. In: The world . April 22, 2016, accessed February 1, 2017 . 
9. ↑ 76-year-old Licher opens the first session of the Bundestag on October 24th. In: giessener-anzeiger.de. Retrieved October 6, 2017 . 
10. ^ Albert Funk: Wolfgang Schäuble, the President. In: Der Tagesspiegel . October 24, 2017. Retrieved October 24, 2017 . 
11. ↑ Board of Trustees | Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom . In: Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom . ( freiheit.org [accessed July 13, 2018]).
12. ↑ Thorsten Jungholt: FDP: Hermann Otto Solms reprimands the stop of party donations by Daimler . April 24, 2019 ( welt.de [accessed May 12, 2019]).
13. ^ GHdA , Princely Houses Volume XV, Limburg an der Lahn 1997, pp. 434–435
14. ^ Obituary notice of Philipp Reinhard Fürst zu Solms-Hohensolms-Lich
15. ^ Obituary notice for Philipp Reinhard zu Solms in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (2015)
16. ↑ CV. (No longer available online.) In: hermann-otto-solms.de. Archived from the original on January 3, 2013 ; Retrieved December 18, 2012 . 
17. ^ GHdA , Princely Houses, Volume XV, Limburg an der Lahn 1997, p. 437